Pat Condell's latest (109th) video and transcript: Hello Saudi Arabia

Hello Saudi Arabia

I’ve had a few emails, recently, from people in Saudi Arabia who seem genuinely puzzled about why I criticize their country. A country, let’s remind ourselves, that’s actively funding the spread of Islamic extremism throughout the West like a poison dye. That’s exporting millions of textbooks around the world teaching children supremacism, separatism, and hatred of non-Muslims. And a country that donates tens of millions of dollars a year to schools in Pakistan that train children to be suicide bombers. A country where women enjoy a status somewhere between human beings and livestock. And where people are executed for things that are not even crimes in the civilized world. And a country whose ruling class indulge themselves freely in alcohol, drugs, and every other vice you can think of, while condemning their people to a social and psychological prison for their own moral good. And they really have to ask?

One guy said, “I’m from Saudi Arabia and I’m proud of my country. Well, good for you. But forgive me for asking why. If you live in Saudi Arabia, what on Earth have you got to be proud of? If you couldn’t dig money straight out of the ground, you’d all be starving. The only thing your country has to offer the world is oil. Well, it’s not the only thing but we don’t need any sand and we’re all up to here with Jihad, thanks very much.

Your country, like the whole Arab world, is entirely and pathetically dependent on Western technology – much of it, Israeli – without which it couldn’t function. What the hell have you got to be proud of? Maybe you’re proud of the fact that your country leads the world in public executions for things like sorcery. We went through that in Europe hundreds of years ago and we’re still embarrassed about it. How do you expect us to feel watching you repeat the same insanity? And there’s no other word for it. It’s not culturally different, it’s not conservative, it’s insane.

And it’s insane because your country is run by insane people. A small group of hard-core, ultra-conservative, religious clerics; each the proud holder of a PhD in pious ignorance, who call themselves the Supreme Council of Islamic Scholars. That sounds like a real brain-fest, doesn’t it? Actually, no, you’re right. It sounds like a bunch of rancid old closet homosexuals digging around in scripture to find ways of justifying their infantile fear of women. Men who’ve reduced their spiritual focus to such a dry ordeal of repression and vindictive cruelty, they’ve sucked all the life out of it and out of themselves. And they’re always looking for new ways to embarrass their country in the eyes of history. To cement its reputation as a backwater of superstition and ignorance and to ensure that their ugly and poisonous Wahabi doctrine will be derided and ridiculed by the whole world, now and for many centuries to come.

Recently, they instructed the religious police (yes, religious police) to prevent anyone who even looks as if they might be gay from entering a school or a university. They really seem to have a major problem with gay people, these guys. Almost as big a problem as they have with women. And that’s the psychological equivalent of a 200-pound tumor that has to be pushed around in a wheelbarrow. Indeed, they’re so obsessed with homosexuality, you can’t help but be suspicious. When they condemn it as forcefully as any closet gay Christian televangelist who consorts with rent boys; what are we supposed to think?

And no absurdity is too great either for the paranoid imagination of the Saudi religious scholar. Like the recent pronouncement that allowing women to drive cars will turn everybody in the country gay because there won’t be any virgins left. Well, apart from the faulty logic, I think they’re way behind the curve on that one.

It’s well-known that homosexuality is absolutely rampant in Saudi Arabia despite being a capital offense. And it’s almost impossible to find a Saudi man – and that would include the clerics – who has not had a gay experience because women are just so hermetically inaccessible. And who can be surprised? If you insist on keeping men and women apart in such an unnatural way, you have to be prepared for the natural consequence: a rise in homosexual activity. Living in a crazy kingdom doesn’t make anybody less human. And certain biological urges will be satisfied one way or another.

Now, of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. The ancient Greeks were gay and there was nothing wrong with them. They routinely had sex with other men, just as they do today in Saudi Arabia, and there’s nothing wrong with it there either. Which is just as well, because it’s no secret, boys. So you can step out of that closet any time you like. All over the world, Saudi Arabia has long had a reputation as a gay country. A country with one king and millions of queens. And the only people who don’t seem to know this are the Saudis. Well, now you do. Indeed, there’s a very good chance that, by percentage of population, Saudi Arabia is actually the gay capital of the world. Now there’s something you can be proud of.

Of course, you Saudis wouldn’t be in this ludicrous and embarrassing situation in the first place if you had the basic decency to treat women as human beings and not as possessions. And when you say to me, “We treat our women well. Our women are looked after and protected, not like yours. Don’t tell us how to treat our women, like after your own.”, that’s the whole point geniuses: they’re not you’re women; you have no ownership; you have no jurisdiction. All you have is brute force. And if that’s all you can use (and it is), you have no business calling yourselves men. I wish there was a nicer way to say that but there isn’t.

And let me tell you, I’m not saying any of this to be insulting. Because believe it or not, I don’t need any more enemies. It’s just that sometimes the truth can sound like an insult when you’re not used to hearing it. But the good news is, thanks to the Internet and Western technology, you soon will be.